Houston.com uses artificial intelligence. We think readers deserve to know exactly where, exactly how, and exactly where a person is responsible for what you read. This page is that explanation. It is maintained by the editorial team and updated whenever our practices change.

Where we use AI

We use AI tools in five places. In every one of them, a person decides what is published.

Drafting assistance

Writers on our team may use AI assistants to outline a story, suggest a structure, tighten a paragraph or propose a headline. The reporting — the calls, the documents, the visits — is done by people, and the final text is written or rewritten by the person whose name is on it. We do not publish articles generated end-to-end by a model.

Research and summarization

AI assistants help us read faster: summarizing long public documents such as city council agendas, court filings, permit records and reports, extracting the parts relevant to a story, and comparing versions. Anything we learn this way is checked against the original source before it appears in an article. A model’s summary is a starting point for reporting, never a citation.

The site chat assistant

Houston.com offers a chat assistant that answers questions about the city using the articles, listings and event data on this site. It is clearly labeled as an AI assistant, it can be wrong, and it may decline questions it cannot answer from our content. Treat its answers as a starting point and check the article or listing it links to. If it gives you a bad answer, tell us through the contact link in the footer.

Images and illustration

Some illustrations on the site, including the artwork on our hub pages and the hero images on certain stories, are produced with generative tools working from our own designs and brand system. We label generated imagery where it appears in an editorial context. We never use AI to create or alter images that are presented as photographs of real people, places or events, and we do not use AI to alter news photographs beyond routine cropping and color correction.

Behind the scenes

AI helps us categorize stories, suggest related articles, draft search descriptions, detect broken links and find data errors in the business directory. These systems make suggestions; editors accept or reject them.

Where humans review

• Every article is read by a person before publication, regardless of how it was drafted.
• Every factual claim that came from an AI summary is traced to a primary source.
• Every quote is verified against a recording, a transcript or the person quoted. AI is never used to generate quotes.
• Every AI-assisted illustration is reviewed for accuracy and appropriateness before it is attached to a story.
• Directory listings enriched by automated tools are spot-checked by staff and can be corrected by the business owner at any time.

Editorial standards

Our standards do not change because a tool changed. Accuracy, attribution and independence apply to AI-assisted work exactly as they apply to everything else. Specifically: we do not fabricate, and we do not allow tools to fabricate on our behalf; we attribute reporting to the people who did it; we disclose material relationships, including the one described below; and we keep the newsroom’s editorial decisions separate from the company’s commercial ones.

We also hold ourselves to a rule for the AI section of this site: every page must be useful with every affiliated product removed. Guides, industry pages and tool lists are written to help a Houston reader first. Commercial placements are a layer on top, selected by relevance to the page, never by ownership. Read the AI in Houston hub or AI for Houston Businesses and judge for yourself.

Experimentation

We experiment with AI features — a new summary format, a different way of surfacing related stories, a tool for readers — and we try to be honest about it. Experiments are labeled as such when they are visible, are limited in scope, and are removed if they do not serve readers. When an experiment changes something about how the site works, we update this page.

Corrections

If an AI tool contributed to an error, that is our error. We correct it the same way we correct any other mistake: promptly, visibly, and with a note explaining what changed. To report an error in an article, a listing or an answer from the chat assistant, use the contact link in the footer of every page. Corrections to AI-assisted content are tracked internally so we can find and fix the patterns that produced them.

Our relationship with Barrett Agentic

Houston.com and Barrett Agentic are affiliated businesses under common ownership. Barrett Agentic develops AI-powered products and experiments across multiple industries. Houston.com may occasionally feature or advertise Barrett Agentic products when they are relevant to our readers.

Here is what that means in practice, so you can tell the difference between what we recommend and what we are paid to show you.

How ads are labeled

Barrett Agentic products appear on Houston.com only as clearly labeled placements. Every one carries the label “Featured AI Tool · From Barrett Agentic”, and every link in one of those placements is marked with the rel="sponsored" attribute so that search engines treat it as advertising, because it is. You will see them in a few fixed formats — a card, a banner, a short in-article call-to-action, or a “featured tool” card on pages in the AI section — and never disguised as an article, a review or an editorial recommendation. Products are shown on a page only when their industry matches the page’s subject.

Editorial references are separate

Occasionally a Barrett Agentic product is genuinely relevant to a story — for example, an article about AI in real estate transactions. When an editor decides to mention one, that mention is an editorial decision, made and disclosed the way we would disclose any other conflict of interest, and the link is not marked as sponsored. Advertising placements are never inserted into a story because of an editorial mention, and editors are never asked to mention products to support advertising.

What we track

We measure whether these placements work. When a labeled placement is shown or clicked, we record the placement, the format, the industry of the page, the device type and a random per-visit identifier, and outbound links carry standard UTM parameters so the destination site knows the click came from Houston.com. We do not record your name, email, IP address or any other personal information for this purpose, we do not set advertising cookies, and we do not follow you to other sites.

Turning it off

Editors can disable these placements on any individual page, and the whole system can be switched off for the site. Pages where the subject makes advertising inappropriate do not carry them.

You can learn more about Barrett Agentic and the products it is building at the Barrett Agentic website.

Questions

If anything on this page is unclear, or you think we have fallen short of it, tell us. The contact link is in the footer. For more on the site itself, see About Houston.com; for what AI is doing across the city, start at Artificial Intelligence in Houston and the business owner’s guide.